Guilty verdict in child-rape trial

Wednesday

Oct 4, 2017 at 6:29 PMOct 4, 2017 at 6:29 PM

Isaac Groves Times-News @TNIGroves

GRAHAM — Jordan Mendoza Guevara, 56, will almost certainly spend the rest of his life in prison.

After hours of closing arguments and a week’s worth of evidence, it took the jury about a half hour the afternoon of Wednesday, Oct. 4, to find Guevara guilty of raping a child, incest and taking indecent liberties with a child. Superior Court Judge Orlando Hudson gave him two sentences of 28 years and nine months to 39 years and six months, with a 23- to 37-month sentence to follow.

"There are a lot of people out there who have faith and confidence in Jordan and will be shocked at this verdict," defense attorney Bob Martin said. "This is a sad, sad case."

Martin filed notice of appeal.

‘A distraction’

Guevara was arrested Jan. 17, 2015. According to Graham police, the mother of the then-12-year-old victim had called authorities at 2:36 a.m. that Saturday immediately after the child disclosed the assault to her. The victim testified that Guevara raped her about 1 a.m.

“She woke up with this defendant on top of her and pulling off her clothes,” Earley said standing across the defense table from and pointing at Guevara during her closing arguments Wednesday morning.

Earley started with a roughly 15-minute statement recapping the compelling evidence the jury had already seen and heard, including the testimony of the now-15-year-old accuser, the DNA evidence showing the defendant’s sperm were found in her underwear and inside her body, the testimony of the sexual assault nurse examiner who collected that biological evidence and spoke to the girl the morning after the alleged rape, and testimony of the police investigator who conducted the forensic interview afterward.

Earley asked the jury to keep the victim in mind because that’s what the case was about, and everything else was a distraction.

“It’s that distraction, that calling in a bomb threat over here to distract from the bank robbery over there,” Earley said, “because that’s the defense’s case — a distraction.”

Martin argued for more than two hours that the girl’s mother was behind the accusation, and had had sex with Guevara that morning before he was charged, and took the condom they used with her to plant the biological evidence against him on the girl’s underwear to set Guevara up to get his money and punish him for their own personal conflicts.

The victim and her mother, Martin said, had a strange exchange of text messages before the arrest: “Mama,” the girl wrote, “What’s the matter?” the mother replied, “You know.” The girl wrote back, and the mother called the police.

“What is it she knew to call the police?” Martin asked, saying she knew either that Guevara was a predator and let him be alone with her daughter, or it was a set-up. He also hammered home that the prosecution didn’t call the girl’s mother to testify.

“They called the first police officer on the scene, but who was the real first responder on the scene?” Martin asked.

Martin reviewed all the doubts he cast on the state’s case throughout the one-week trial, like the greater quantity of the defendant’s sperm in the girl’s panties than inside her, and the absence of his DNA in skin cells found in the samples taken for the rape kit, which he said should have been there after the friction of a violent rape.

“I don’t have to prove that,” Martin said. “I just have to raise in your mind the possibility that it could have happened.”

It was a theme he came back to throughout his closing argument — the mother’s manipulation, law enforcement’s rush to judgment and the state’s burden of proof.

“If it does not fully satisfy or entirely convince you, that is a reasonable doubt,” he said.

Whose victim?

Martin conceded a couple of points. One was that the victim’s testimony was credible. But, he said, her slow responses and guarded behavior on the stand could be the result of trauma and embarrassment as the prosecution contended, or an internal struggle with the truth and fear of her mother’s retribution.

“Could it be that she was testifying to something that she knew was not true and she had to remember what she was supposed to say?” Martin asked. “I have no doubt that she has been victimized, but not by my client.”

Martin called the mother a “vengeful, jealous, money-hungry, manipulative person.”

He drove the idea home, pointing at the woman sitting in the audience, saying he had found her earlier in the week talking to one of his witnesses, Marcia Teixeira — one of two women who testified that the girl’s mother had said she could get rid of a man by planting evidence on her daughter and framing him for rape — in the witness waiting room, saying she intimidated her, making it more difficult to get her to testify.

In her roughly hour-long rebuttal of Martin’s argument, Earley called it “nothing more than the plot of a terrible Lifetime TV movie.”

Reporter Isaac Groves can be reached at igroves@thetimesnews.com or 336-506-3045. Follow him on Twitter at @tnigroves.